This book is an invitation to embed Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy in its historical context: a time of change. Dwelling on Raymond William s concept of culture as social process, the author reads a selected number of tragedies as being influenced by the conflicting epistemologies of the fading Middle Ages and a dawning modernity. The final catastrophe in Doctor Faustus, The Spanish Tragedy, King Lear, Sejanus his Fall and The Duchess of Malfi is located in the melting pot of rivalling discourses."